Dark Winds Recap: Haunting Pasts
The tone of AMC’s neo-Western Dark Winds, based on the Leaphorn & Chee novels by Tony Hillerman, has been consistently grave. It has its moments of levity, but for the most part, we have seen Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn (a wonderful Zahn McClarnon) hold together the Navajo Tribal Police as they have faced the encroachment of nefarious outside forces into the Navajo Nation. Fighting off corrupt FBI agents and the predatory B.J. Vines, the owner of the uranium mine where Joe’s son was killed in an explosion, Joe has been unshakably even-keeled. This season, Dark Winds feels heavier and more ominous than it has been in the past. Season one dealt with some mystical themes, but now the sense is that Joe is perennially at risk of danger, both human and not. As Roxana Hadadi pointed out in her review, we get to see a different side of him. Until now, we’d never known Joe to experience fear.
What frightens Joe is Ye’iitsoh, a monstrous entity in Navajo folklore. In the show, Ye’iitsoh is depicted as a gigantic sort of humanoid, with clawed fingers and a draped fur that is slightly reminiscent of Bigfoot. In the first episode of season three, Joe and his Sergeant Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon) point out that its mythos resembles Mexican folklore’s La Llorona, in just one of a few instances throughout the season that approximate the Indigenous and Chicano cultures of the Southwest. We get more of this intersection through Agent Bernadette Manuelito (Jessica Matten), Joe’s former Sergeant, Chee’s erstwhile lover, and newly installed U.S. Border Patrol and Customs agent, now stationed in Hachita, New Mexico.
When we open the third season, an injured Joe is being pursued by Ye’iitsoh in the desert. We flashback to seven days earlier, as Joe and Chee look into the disappearance of two boys, Ernesto Cata and George Bowlegs. By the end of that first episode, Joe and Sheriff Gordo Sena (somewhat randomly plucked out of retirement) find Ernesto dead in a drain pipe, with an arrowhead in his mouth. As “Náá’tsoh” opens, looking at Ernesto’s body in the morgue, Joe is visited by Ye’iitsoh –– as well as by the image of Vines’s frozen face.
According to Joe, the placement of the arrowhead suggests that whoever killed Ernesto isn’t Diné; it’d be blasphemous to defile a sacred object. That goes some way towards dispelling his notion that Shorty Bowlegs, George’s father and Chee’s childhood bully, might have something to do with the murder, but Chee isn’t convinced. His opinion of Shorty is informed by their shared past: a contentious, physically abusive relationship between his mother and Shorty’s father nearly got him killed. This is the first we hear of Chee’s past — though we’ve known since the first season that he’d planned on leaving the reservation and becoming an FBI agent in Washington, we haven’t been given many details of his emotional life before he came to the NTP undercover. Whatever wounds he still has, they’re not healed: Chee is determined to book Shorty. Through Shorty’s cousin, Winford, he’s able to establish a reasonable line of suspicion. Winford admits that Shorty had asked him to lie about their whereabouts on the night Ernesto was killed.
Elsewhere on the reservation, we catch up with the archeologists. Dr. Reynolds and Teddi Isaacs have been studying the connection between the Folsom and Navajo peoples, which is another gesture towards presenting the Navajo Nation not as an isolated community but as a place that has historically been in touch with other cultures. Teddi is rattled by the news of Ernesto’s death — suspiciously rattled, given she had told Chee and Joe that she only knew the boys from the work they did on the archeological site every once in a while. After examining the arrowhead that had been put in Ernesto’s mouth, Dr. Reynolds concludes that it’s fake.
In the meantime, George still hasn’t turned up, and Shorty’s suspicious behavior does not do him any favors, so Joe and Gordo get a warrant to search his property. In his barn, Joe finds a bloody knife along with a truly disturbing amount of swarming ants. Much to Chee’s delight, the weapon plus the bad alibi are enough to bring Shorty in for questioning. But that lead doesn’t go anywhere, either: Gordo returns from the lab with news that the knife was smeared with horse, rather than human, blood.
Back at Kayenta Police Station, a new FBI agent, Sylvie Washington, is snooping around. She has come to the reservation to “button up some cases,” which really means looking into Vines’s disappearance. Unlike other Special Agents we’ve met, Washington isn’t outwardly hostile –– she leads with a pretend-I’m-not-here casualness that is clearly underpinned by suspicion towards Joe. Her strategy is to earn trust, if not Joe’s himself, then of the people who matter to him. It only takes a couple of days for her to finesse a dinner invitation from Joe’s wife, Emma.
I’m interested in seeing how Emma’s character develops this season. “I had no idea women could join the FBI,” she marvels at Joe in a comment that feels too naive for a character of Emma’s shrewdness. Dark Winds took an explicit turn with its social and political commentary in its second season; as a result, the dialogue occasionally veered into goofy literalness, and many of its heavy-handed lines were given to Emma. She spent a lot of time refusing to speak with Mary Landon, the Los Angeles Times journalist who had come to the reservation hoping to shed light on the heinous Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, which sterilized Indigenous women like Emma without their consent and against their will. Emma’s grief was the basis of her relationship with the young Sally and her baby. By season’s end, though, Emma changed her mind. The dynamic between her and Mary suddenly flipped on its head: when Mary warned that speaking up could be risky, Emma retorted with unearned sentimentality that “staying quiet is risky.” When and why did she change her mind? The nuance that complicates the notion of Joe’s character as only-good, only-virtuous, is absent from his wife’s perspective.
But let us leave Navajo country and travel a few hundred miles south to check in on our girl Bernadette. Having secretly spoken with the mother and daughter whom she had apprehended at the border after they escaped from a white van, Bern can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s more to the story, no matter how much her boss, Ed Henry, tells her to forget about it. In this episode’s opening sequence, we see two men in a white truck, one of them wearing the gun belt Bern had left behind. We never get to know more about his involvement, though — his co-conspirator asphyxiates him with a plastic bag until he’s unconscious and buries him alive under desert sand before he can get another word in.
Bern follows a clue the little girl had given her, a doodle of a sphere with an S and R inside, to the Spenser Ranch. It belongs to Tom Spenser (Bruce Greenwood), a towering cowboy who would have immediately rang alarm bells even if we hadn’t seen what is most likely a human trafficking vehicle roaming along his property. Spenser knows who Bern is before she introduces herself, and he has the kind of cool self-assuredness of a certified psychopath. He takes Bern down for a closer look at the van, and she notices the plates were changed. Besides that, nothing seems particularly off, except for a large structure on the ranch that Spenser says traps the gas from some of the oil wells, which is probably where he keeps the bodies.
In New Mexico, Bern has few allies; two, to be exact. One of them is Agent Eleanda Garza, a Tohono O’odham woman with a hardened sensibility who warns her to keep clear of Spenser. In his position as oil magnate, he might as well be the King of Hachita: according to Garza, he runs as much as one-third of the intelligence used by the Border Patrol. In other words, he’s deeply enmeshed with the work of the agency, which, of course, would make it quite simple for him to run a human trafficking ring without consequence.
Bern’s other ally is Agent Ivan Muños, who seems pretty determined to get to know Bern in ways that Chee failed to do. After helping her with a flat tire one night, he takes her out for a beer, a game of pool, a little dancing, and a teeny bit of information. Bern asks him about the Spenser oil tanks that drive through the border’s weight station at night. The protocol, according to Muños, is to write down their weight and let them go; no inspection necessary. As if, for a woman with a suspicion! When the first Spenser truck drives through under her watch, Bern has the drivers step out for the inspection. One of them is the man we saw asphyxiate his co-conspirator at the beginning of the episode; according to his license, his name is Roberto de Baca, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s only the first layer of his unsavory depths.
Meanwhile, back on the reservation, Chee presses Shorty on George’s whereabouts. Shorty refuses to collaborate at first, but Chee has a good appeal to reason: it would be better for both of them if George would speak with the NTP. He’s the only one who knows who killed Ernesto, because he was the only one there. Finally relenting, Shorty takes Chee and Joe to the cabin where George is supposedly hiding out. It’s an appropriately dark, very windy night. The horses immediately start freaking once they’re tied to the fence. Shorty goes in the cabin first, while Chee watches the back door and Joe waits outside. After he hears a scuffle, Joe follows in to find Shorty on the ground with a bloody head. When he looks up, he sees Ye’iitsoh head-on, right in front of him — he shoots, and the figure disappears, but not before it has left scratch marks on his arm deep enough to tear his uniform sleeve. Nearly catatonic, all he can say to Chee is that it’s real.